Career of Evil

Sole survivor, cursed with second sight,

Haunted savior, cried into the night.

                        Blue Öyster Cult, “Sole Survivor”

Four days passed. Numb with shock and misery, Robin at first hoped and even believed that Strike would call her, that he would regret what he had said to her, that he would realize what a mistake he had made. Linda had left, kind and supportive to the last, but, Robin suspected, secretly happy to think that Robin’s association with the detective had ended.

Matthew had expressed enormous sympathy in the face of Robin’s devastation. He said that Strike did not know how lucky he had been. He had enumerated for her all the things she had done for the detective, foremost of which was accepting a laughably small salary for unreasonably long hours. He reminded Robin that her status as partner in the agency had been entirely illusory, and totted up all the proofs of Strike’s lack of respect for her: the absence of a partnership agreement, the lack of overtime pay, the fact that she always seemed to be the one who made tea and went out to buy sandwiches.

A week previously, Robin would have defended Strike against all such accusations. She would have said that the nature of the work necessitated long hours, that the moment to demand a pay rise was not when the business was fighting for its very survival, that Strike made her mugs of tea quite as often as she made them for him. She might have added that Strike had spent money he could ill afford training her in surveillance and countersurveillance, and that it was unreasonable to expect him, as senior partner, sole investor and founding member of the agency, to place her on absolutely equal legal footing with himself.

Yet she said none of those things, because the last two words that Strike had spoken to her were with her every day like the sound of her own heartbeat: gross misconduct. The memory of Strike’s expression in that last moment helped her pretend that she saw things exactly as Matthew did, that her dominant emotion was anger, that the job which had meant everything to her could be easily replaced, that Strike had no integrity or moral sense if he could not appreciate that Angel’s safety trumped all other considerations. Robin had neither the will nor the energy to point out that Matthew had performed an abrupt volte-face on the last point, because he had been furious, initially, when he had found out that she had gone to Brockbank’s.

As the days went by without any contact from Strike, she felt unspoken pressure from her fiancé to pretend that the prospect of their wedding on Saturday not only made up for her recent sacking, but consumed all her thoughts. Having to fake excitement while he was present made Robin relieved to be alone during the day while Matthew worked. Every evening, before he returned, she deleted the search history on her laptop, so that he would not see that she was constantly looking for news about the Shacklewell Ripper online and — just as often — Googling Strike.

On the day before she and Matthew were due to leave for Masham, he arrived home holding a copy of the Sun, which was not his usual read.

“Why have you got that?”

Matthew hesitated before answering and Robin’s insides twisted.

“There hasn’t been another—?”

But she knew there had not been another killing: she had been following the news all day.

He opened the paper, folded it to a page about ten in, and handed it to her, his expression hard to read. Robin found herself staring at her own photograph. She was walking with her head down in the picture, dressed in her trench coat, leaving court after giving evidence at the well-publicized trial of the murderer of Owen Quine. Two smaller pictures were set into her own: one of Strike, looking hungover, the other of the spectacularly beautiful model whose killer they had worked together to catch. Beneath the photo spread were the words:

LANDRY DETECTIVE SEEKS NEW GIRL FRIDAY

Cormoran Strike, the detective who solved the murder cases of both supermodel Lula Landry and author Owen Quine, has parted company with glamorous assistant Robin Ellacott, 26.

The detective has placed an advertisement for the position online: “If you have a background in police or military investigative work and would like to pursue—